Fight Health Worries|Healthy Living Techniques

From an Aug. 16 article “Industry pushes meaningful use through incentives” in Modern Healthcare (signup unfortunately required):

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As we predicted, more stringent requirements by the US Internal Revenue Service for financial reporting by not-for-profit organizations, including hospitals and hospital systems, have produced an enlarging parade of revelations of obese pay packages for hospital leaders.  The latest report came out courtesy the Baltimore Sun:
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With apologies to the late Frank Zappa… even though we are going through the dog days of summer, the parade of health care troubles in the news is never ending, so I thought I would recap some of the more interesting issues discussed by some of my fellow health care skeptic bloggers.

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The Wall Street Journal reported on a study in Health Affairs entitled “A Progress Report On Electronic Health Records In U.S. Hospitals” by Harvard researcher Ashish Jha and colleagues.

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Two recent stories from two different parts of the US continue the theme of ever increasing concentration of power in our health care system.

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In the Battle of Britain in WW2, the Royal Air Force (RAF) heroically repelled a foreign invasion of the UK.

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At my post Are computers in medicine narcotic? “Why did the National Programme for IT fail?” I observed that the healthcare IT mania/bubble is being driven in part by non-clinical hysterics who believe they will somehow “revolutionize” medicine with information technology tools that are barely able to show improvements at this point in time.

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As we predicted, it seems that the US Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) increased reporting requirements for not-for-profit organizations are leading to more examples of the coziness now prevalent among the top leaders of such organizations.  The latest entry in this new parade comes from a story in the Bradenton (Florida) Herald about a not-for-profit community health agency whose mission is to provide health care to the poor and disenfranchised:
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I noted an article Why did the National Programme for IT fail? by an “ex-IT person” at the site Smart Healthcare.com in a series entitled “Patient from Hell.”

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A long time ago, in 2006, we first blogged about a “new species of conflict of interest” which we thought might prove to be even more important than those afflicting health care that were then starting to be discussed.  This involved health care organizational leaders who were simultaneously members of the boards of directors of for-profit health care corporations.  We posited these conflicts would be particularly important because being on the board of directors entails not just a financial incentive.  It ostensibly requires board members to ”demonstrate unyielding loyalty to the company’s shareholders” [Per Monks RAG, Minow N. Corporate Governance, 3rd edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. P.200.]   Thus, for example, the conflict posed by the president of a university, to whom a medical school and academic medical center report, who also is the director of a pharmaceutical company, would be extreme.

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